“Drinking coffee and eating donuts on a stakeout,” said Yolanda. She looked mildly horrified. “Am I a cop, now?”
I smirked. “Honorary FBI agent.”
She shuddered. Then frowned, realizing something. “Wait, are we partners?”
She meant it as a joke. But when we looked at each other, our gazes locked. Something had happened, these last few days. The horrors of the case had bonded us inseparably. We were partners.
We switched on the radio and chatted about music and the news and nothing at all. She was easy to talk to, now that I’d gotten past that prickly exterior. And it became comfortable: just the two of us sitting in the darkness, looking out at the outside world.
Like a date.
It’s not a date.
But I couldn’t stop looking at her. The neon sign of the check-cashing place next to us put blue gleams into Yolanda’s black hair and the street lights threw out just enough glow to show me the edge of those soft lips. And then, when a car roared past, its lights would light up her face for a split-second: an instant of a smile, a glimpse of her looking thoughtful. If I missed one, it was gone forever. I didn’t want to miss any.
I got it bad for this woman.
I fought to close that feeling down. But, dammit, I couldn’t help it.
Two hours went by like two minutes. We finished the coffee and half the donuts, and gave the rest to a couple of homeless guys. After the third hour, the rain stopped and I ran across the street to a Chinese place and brought us back cartons of steaming rice and noodles, sesame chicken and satay beef. We ate, chopsticks clicking in the darkness, people-watching the passers-by. When we’d finished, I told her, “There are napkins in the glove box.”
She opened it to get them... and saw the gun lying there.
“It’s my spare,” I said, patting the one in my holster.
“I’ve never seen one before.” She stared at it as if it might bite her. “Have you ever had to use it?”
“A couple of times.”
“Ever have to kill anyone?”
I looked away, then sighed and nodded. “Most people surrender. But just occasionally, you get someone who’s really lost it. They won’t let you take them in. They come at you and the only way to stop them is to kill them.”
Yolanda looked up at the apartment we were watching, its windows still dark. “You think this guy’s like that?”
I nodded sadly. “Based on what we’ve seen so far? Yeah. I got the feeling he might be.”
She looked across at me. “Why’d you want to join the FBI?” She said it as if she genuinely couldn’t understand why someone would want to. It was a reminder that, to her, the FBI was still the enemy.
I hesitated. I nearly said, “You know, to serve my country,” like I say to everyone who asks. But that’s not the full story. The full story, I’d never told to anyone except Becky.
“Back in high school,” I said, “I played football. Only thing I was any good at. My life was practice, practice, practice, and trying to buy a keg for a team party. You know, jock stuff. But…” I sighed. “I had a thing for comic books. I liked them, even though they were for nerds, back then. I used to pay one of the geeky kids to slip them to me, so I didn’t have to go to the comic book store.” I shook my head. “I don’t even know why I liked them. They were dumb. In the real world, there weren’t any guys in capes, or billionaires cleaning up the streets.”
“Anyway, my final year in high school... a couple of guys on the team, Frankie and Ralph, they come into the locker room crowing about how they’d got one of the cheerleaders drunk and taken turns with her behind the bleachers, even though she’d pretended she hadn’t wanted it.”
I heard Yolanda suck in a breath.
“The next day, the girl goes to the cops. She has a split lip and a black eye. And the team just closes ranks. Even the coach, who’s worried about losing two kids who are heading for football scholarships. He started talking about how we all had to stick together and how none of us had heard Frankie and Ralph boasting about anything.” I grimaced, remembering. “He said the little slut must have wanted it. He said she must have gotten drunk afterwards and fallen over.”
“And I looked at these two guys, who I knew were going to get away with it, who were going to go off to college and do the same thing there, and I realized the comic books were lying. There were no heroes. Just guys like me.”
“I didn’t want to do the right thing. I knew what would happen if I did. But if I didn’t, no one else would. So I went to the cops and testified to what Frankie and Ralph had said in the locker room.”
“What happened?” asked Yolanda quietly.
“Frankie and Ralph were charged, but one of their dads had a fancy lawyer who talked their sentences down to a slap on the wrist. None of the other guys would even talk to me. I got frozen off the team, which meant I didn’t get the football scholarship I’d been hoping for. And the cheerleader dropped out of school. Doing the right thing had done basically nothing.”
Yolanda grabbed my hand and squeezed hard.
“But... I couldn’t stop doing it,” I said. “I’d figured out that if idiots like me don’t take some sort of a stand, things will get even worse. I managed to get into a second-rate college and get a degree, then I joined the NYPD and got on the detective track. After five years of that, I joined the FBI.”
I looked across at Yolanda. It was almost completely black in the car, now, and I couldn’t see her expression. But when she spoke, I could hear the emotion in her voice. “You are not an idiot,” she said.
“I’m no genius. Most of the time, I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
“But you understand people. I wish I could.”
We sat in silence for a while. The car rocked as a truck thundered past.
She glanced down at her legs, and then at me.
“I already used up my stupid question for the day,” I said.
She swallowed. “I’m giving you a bonus one on account of you being a decent freakin’ human being.”
“You don’t like talking about it,” I countered.
“No,” she agreed. “Not unless the person asking actually cares.”
I stared at her in the darkness. The traffic had died away and the only sound was our breathing.
“Yolanda?” I asked. “What happened to your legs?”
22
Calahan
“I was running,” she said.
I wasn’t ready for how hard that hit me. I’d only ever known her like this, I’d never thought of her running or walking or even standing. Oh God….
“I didn’t even like running.” I saw her head tilt in the darkness and she stared down at her legs. Her voice was hollow. “But my brother, Josh, loved it and he was always trying to get me to go outside more, so once a week we’d go for a run. We normally ran a loop around the Riverbank State Park but we’d done it so many times, I wanted to switch it up a little. So we decided to go across the JS instead.”
I froze. “You were there?!”
She nodded in the darkness.
My stomach twisted and I felt the nausea rise inside me. The JS is burned into the psyche of every New Yorker. That’s what happened to her?
The Jonas Salk Bridge, or “The JS,” as New Yorkers dubbed it, had been an epic, multi-billion dollar construction project. Connecting New Jersey and Manhattan, it was designed to take some of the load off the George Washington Bridge. The mayor had been elected on a platform of getting it built and when it was finished, everyone, even the naysayers, had to admit it was something special.
Named after the New York-born inventor of the polio vaccine, it was a colossal structure made of smooth white stone, its span hanging from gleaming steel cables, its towers rising high above the Hudson River. By day, it was shining and bright, but as the sun went down and the stone turned gold and orange, it became truly beautiful. Everyone loved it. Tourists flocked to take pictures of it. Traffic improved. They pr
inted special commemorative postage stamps.
Three weeks after it opened, America turned on the morning news to see the bridge, loaded with traffic, trains, and pedestrians, collapsing into the Hudson River.
I’d rushed over there along with every FBI agent in the city, on or off duty. I closed my eyes and instantly, I could see what had greeted me when I arrived. The bridge had broken into pieces and most of it was already under the water. In places, the debris had piled up and chunks of concrete and steel broke the surface like islands. The water was filled with cars and debris and screaming, terrified people. If there’s a hell, that sight is the closest I ever want to get to it.
We’d presumed it was a terrorist bomb, at first. But it wasn’t.
“You know why it fell?” asked Yolanda in the darkness. “I mean, exactly why?”
I shook my head. I wasn’t capable of speech, thinking of Yolanda in the middle of that.
“One number,” she said tightly. “Just one. One tiny error in the architect’s calculations that nobody spotted. I went over the blueprints, afterwards, trying to understand. One little error, but it meant that every car that drove over the bridge was creating a shearing force across the central tower. Way down inside, where no one could see it, the whole thing was cracking.”
She swallowed. “My brother and I were running on the pedestrian walkway, under the road. We were…”—her voice went tight—“buried.” She was staring at the stoplight down the street, the reflection in her eyes turning red, amber, green. “The first thing I remember was how black it was,” she said. “I mean black. I opened my eyes and I couldn’t tell I’d opened them. I was lying on my back on a concrete slab, and there was another slab on my legs, pinning me. I called out for Josh, but he didn’t call back. I was all alone.”
She kept staring at the traffic light. I realized she was reassuring herself that she wasn’t still down there.
“An hour went by,” she said. “And then I heard Josh call my name. I’ve never been so glad to hear anything in my life. He was trapped too, maybe twenty feet below me, and he’d just woken up. I couldn’t see and I couldn’t move, but I wasn’t alone.”
She drew in a slow breath, fighting to stay calm. “Hours went by. No light, no sound except the sound of each other’s voices. I don’t want to think about what it would have been like, if he hadn’t been there. I would have gone insane. We talked to each other, told each other it was going to be okay. We did math problems in our heads, calling out the numbers to each other.” She turned and looked sharply at me. “I know that sounds stupid, but—”
“No,” I said gently. “It doesn’t.”
“And then, after about six hours, I felt something hit my cheek. A drip of water. And once it started, it didn’t stop. Drip, drip, drip, coming from somewhere above. A long way above because it’s going really fast by the time it hits me. And I realized it was much worse than we thought—”
She broke off and looked away, her lungs filling as she sucked in air. I saw the panic that was coming and groped for her hand in the darkness. Found it and grabbed it with both of mine. Her whole body had gone tense. “Yolanda,” I said quietly. “You don’t have to—”
She shook her head fiercely, mad at herself. “Yes I do.” She took a moment, gathering her strength, then forced the words out. “We realized we were below the surface of the river, in an air pocket in a pile of debris. The water was leaking in. We were going to drown.”
“We had to move, so I started trying to figure out some way of lifting the slab that was on my legs. I reached down and felt around, trying to find out exactly how I was pinned….” She paused. “And that’s when I realized I wasn’t pinned. The slab I’d thought was pinning me was just lightly resting against my legs. I wasn’t trapped, I just couldn’t make my legs move. I made the effort in my head and they didn’t respond. Sometime during the collapse, something had hit me hard enough to shatter the bones and damage the nerves.”
“Josh knew something was wrong,” she said. “I don’t know how. He heard it in my breathing. He asked me what was wrong. And…” The headlights of a passing car lit up her face just as she turned to the side and stared out of the window, her lips pressed tight together. “I told him I was fine. I figured we were going to die anyway. I didn’t want him to worry about me.” She looked down at her legs. “And maybe, if I didn’t tell him, it wouldn’t be real.”
That was how it started, I realized. Not telling Lily, living alone, so she didn’t have to see people react to the wheelchair.... It had all started in that awful darkness. If no one knows, it’s not real.
“We lay there for hours, listening to the water slowly filling up. And then... I heard something above me. They were digging through to us. We were going to be o—okay!”
I didn’t miss the hitch in her voice, the little gulp. Tears were seconds away.
“The noise got closer. Drills, heavy machinery..., and a light. Blinding, because it was the first light I’d seen since that morning. Someone was shining a flashlight down at me. I yelled to Josh that we were going to be okay. But then….”
She stopped. Her hand squeezed mine and I squeezed back. When she spoke again, the raw emotion in her voice made my heart break. “The debris pile was like a house of cards. Every time the rescue workers moved something, the pile shifted and settled lower and more water flooded in. They knew it was risky, but they could see where I was and they figured they could get to me before it all collapsed.” Her voice grew tortured. “They didn’t realize Josh was there as well, further down.”
She twisted around and stared at me, eyes wild, and cheeks glistening with tears. “I tried to tell them! I was yelling, stop! My brother’s down there! But they were using drills, and banging, and yelling to each other, they couldn’t hear. And I felt everything shifting and moving below me, and I could hear him screaming—” She swallowed. “And then the screaming sto—stopped.”
I silently cursed. I was in pieces, listening. I just wanted to—
“They got a rope around me,” she croaked. “I was yelling at them, I can’t leave Josh. But they were in a panic, the whole debris pile was caving in. They hauled me out. About a minute later, it all collapsed. They were happy, they were celebrating that they’d saved me, but Josh was—”
I leaned forward and grabbed her. Pulled her into my arms and wrapped her tight and the hell with keeping my distance.
23
Yolanda
HIS ARMS hooked under mine and I was lifted effortlessly out of my seat. Suddenly, my face was between those huge, hard pecs, my tears soaking his shirt.
He held me in the dark as the pain came out of me in hot, angry, tearful bursts. “It should have—He was—”
His arms had wrapped around my back and he squeezed me tight. “I know.”
That made it worse because clearly, he didn’t understand. “You don’t! He was—He was smarter, and funnier, and he had friends, he was normal, he was—he was better! It should have—”
My voice shredded and I descended into wordless sobs. But he just held on tight. And at last, when my crying had slowed enough to hear it, he put his lips to my ear and he said, “I know.”
And this time, I heard what I’d missed before. It wasn’t just a platitude. I could hear the raw pain in his voice. He did know. He knew what it was to think: it should have been me.
Oh God. Becky.
I wrapped my arms tighter around him. I was a wreck and I knew I couldn’t help him now, but my God, somehow, I was going to.
He held me until I’d cried myself out, my eyes burning and all my defenses lying open. All I could do was state facts. “They only got eight people out,” I said. “Eight, out of over three hundred that had been on the bridge.”
“I remember,” he whispered. “I remember the stretchers.”
I thought of being carried to the ambulance, blue and red flashing lights and camera flashes as we’d moved through a crowd of workers and volunteers, police and paramedics
and FBI agents. Calahan and I must have passed within six feet of each other.
I told him about the hospital and the moment the doctor told me I’d never walk again. When I told him about my boyfriend dumping me, Calahan’s face turned murderous. I told him about being pushed out of my job and spending more and more time in my apartment. And I told him how it felt to lose my twin. “There aren’t many people like us,” I said. “No one else understood me like he did. Not even my folks.” I shook my head. “I don’t see them much, now. I want to, but whenever I see them, they want me to move back to Oregon. But I can’t give up on New York, and Josh wouldn’t have wanted me to. They mean well, they’re just still grieving for him. We all are. We never even got to bury him.”
We weren’t alone. Over a year later, hundreds of families were still looking for closure. There was just no practical way to recover bodies buried under thousands of tons of rubble at the bottom of the river. The disaster still haunted the city: there were charities for the affected families, grief counseling and countless investigations and inquiries. The architect who’d designed the bridge had taken his own life just days after it happened, when he found his mistake.
“Everyone said I was lucky,” I said. The darkness made it easy to talk, to admit things I’d never told anyone. “I mean, I survived. But….” I looked down at my legs.
“You don’t feel lucky,” Calahan said gently.
I nodded. Then I shook my head. “And then I feel guilty. I know I’m privileged. Most disabled people can’t convert their apartments, or work from home, or—”
“Listen,” he said, his voice like iron. “You’ve got nothing to feel guilty about. You came through hell. You’re br—”
“Don’t say that! Don’t say I’m brave. I’m not brave, I didn’t have a choice.”
Hold Me in the Dark Page 12
